Accenture Q4 2026 Earnings Call: Complete Transcript

Accenture (NYSE: ACN ) reported fourth-quarter financial results on Thursday. The transcript from the company's fourth-quarter earnings call has been provided below. APIs provide real-time access to earnings call transcripts and financial data. Visit to learn more.

7 billion, a 7% growth in local currency, driven by broad-based market expansion and significant bookings from top 10 ecosystem partners. 9 billion in Q4, including Ookla and Wailer, to expand in high-growth areas and enhance industry-specific capabilities. For fiscal 2026, Accenture achieved $74 billion in revenue with 5% growth in local currency and significant expansion in AI-related services, ending the year with 317 diamond clients. Future guidance for fiscal 2027 anticipates 3% to 6% revenue growth in local currency, with continued investment in AI and strategic acquisitions projected to reach $5 billion.

Accenture's strategic focus remains on leveraging AI to drive client transformations and enhance operational efficiency, exemplified by partnerships with companies like FedEx and BP. Full Transcript OPERATOR Good day and welcome to the Accenture fourth quarter 2026 financial results conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero.

After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note today's event is being recorded.

I'd now like to turn the conference over to Alexia Quadrani, Executive Director and Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Alexia Quadrani, Executive Director and Head of Investor Relations Thank you, operator, and thanks everyone for joining us today on our fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2026 earnings call. As the operator just mentioned, I'm Alexia Quadrani, Executive Director, Head of Investor Relations.

On today's call you will hear from Julie Sweet, our Chair and Chief Executive Officer, and Angie Park, our Chief Financial Officer. We hope you've had an opportunity to review both the earnings release and the accompanying presentation issued prior to this call. Let me outline the agenda for today. Julie will begin with an overview of our Q4 results and step back to look at fiscal 2026 overall before following with a brief update on our market positioning.

Angie will then take you through the detailed financial numbers, including the income statement and balance sheet, along with key operational metrics for the fourth quarter and full fiscal year before providing a business outlook for the first quarter and full year fiscal 2027. We will then open the line for your questions before Julie closes with a wrap up.

Some of the matters we'll discuss on this call, including our business outlook, are forward-looking and as such are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to those factors set forth in today's earnings release and discussed in our annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and other SEC filings. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in this call. During our call today, we will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures which we believe provide useful information for investors. com.

As always, Accenture assumes no obligation to update the information presented on this conference call. Now let me turn the call over to Julie. Julie Sweet, Chair and Chief Executive Officer Thank you, Alexia, and everyone joining us this morning. And thank you to our more than 814,000 reinventors around the world for your extraordinary work and commitment to our clients.

Before Angie takes you through the detailed numbers and our FY27 outlook, I will start with Q4 and then step back to look at fiscal 2026 overall. 7 billion, growing 7% in local currency above the top end of our guided range. Growth was broad based across markets, industries and both types of work, and we once again took significant market share. Revenue from work with our top 10 ecosystem partners continued to outpace our overall growth.

2 billion of bookings in Q4, reflecting the relevance of Accenture to our clients and demonstrating again our strong competitive position. I was particularly pleased with our 37 clients with bookings greater than $100 million. Our focus on being relevant where our clients are spending helped us capture this strong level of bookings even though the overall demand environment, including discretionary spending, did not meaningfully change. We also delivered strong margin expansion, EPS growth and free cash flow while continuing to invest in our business and our people.

9 billion in acquisitions, approximately $3 billion of capital related to the Cyber OT acquisitions in Dragos due to September due to record timing and we are pleased those transactions now closed in Q4. We continue to use our strong balance sheet and acquisition experience as competitive advantages to accelerate our strategy and ultimately fuel organic growth. As a reminder, we use acquisitions to scale in high growth areas, deepen our industry and functional capabilities and expand into new growth areas which increasingly include businesses with non-FTE commercial models.

In Q4 we closed Ookla, a global leader in network intelligence, competitive benchmarking and customer experience analytics, which is an expansion into a new growth area with a non-FTE commercial model. Ookla also deepens our industry skills in the core value chain of the comms and tech industries. We also closed Wailer, a leading creator and social agency recognized for its creative excellence and ability to deliver measurable business outcomes. Wailer is part of our focus on expanding our functional skills within our SONG business in a high growth area.

To help accelerate our strategy to expand in the mid market, we closed Comware, an end-to-end technology services provider with deep SAP, CRM and manufacturing expertise serving Japan's mid market. We also announced our agreement to acquire McCoy, a trusted Dutch SAP transformation partner for mid market companies. Finally, we announced an agreement to acquire Industries Excellence Group which deepens our engineering skills as part of our supply chain and engineering business. Turning to demand in Q4, large-scale reinventions, including many driven by AI, drove strong demand in spending, transforming functions and building out digital cores.

Our clients are also focused on AI and believe AI will help them achieve more than previously possible across the enterprise. But clients remain at very different stages of readiness. Much of our growth today comes from continuing to build their digital core, data foundations and the enterprise AI stack that they need to use AI at scale, and many are just starting their AI journey. Nearly 100 additional clients initiated their first advanced AI work with us this quarter, bringing the fiscal 2026 total to more than 400.

Because we are investing in our platforms and new solutions, we are able to embed advanced AI earlier into large-scale reinventions. Our proprietary assets and platforms, ecosystem relationships and our ability to deliver the work through consulting, managed services or a combination of both allows us to meet clients where they are and help them move at pace. Our managed services-led work also includes significant consulting and AI expertise as many clients use this work to both reinvent and to get greater certainty around outcomes including cost savings. Against this backdrop, two things stand out.

First, our largest client relationships continue to expand as clients take on broader, more strategic transformations. FedEx is a great example of how our largest client relationships grow over time. We began by moving part of its applications to the cloud. As more deliveries shifted to homes, FedEx launched One FedEx to create a more connected, flexible and efficient operation.

Delivering on that vision requires coordinating the technology, data and processes that keep the business running, all while FedEx moves millions of packages every day. Today, we're helping build the digital core behind One FedEx while supporting its investment in its people through enterprise-wide AI fluency programs. Together, this work is helping FedEx make supply chains smarter and embed AI more deeply into the way work gets done. Our partnership has continued to deepen as FedEx has expanded our role with additional managed services and modernization work designed to streamline operations, enhance customer service and support future growth.

That is how our relationships grow. Each success creates the opportunity for the next. The second standout from the quarter is how our AI demand is broadening. Because of both the depth and breadth of our expertise in the various functions of an enterprise across industry, process, operating model, data, technology and AI, we continue to see AI being embedded in the broader transformations our clients are undertaking.

BP, one of the world's largest energy and convenience businesses, operates across more than 150 markets with over 10 million customer touchpoints every day. To turn that scale into a growth advantage, Accenture Song is helping BP build a global marketing engine that combines data, AI and marketing expertise, deepening customer intelligence to move from insight to action faster. BP's marketing teams operated with hundreds of regional processes, making it harder to scale campaigns consistently across markets. We replaced that complexity with a single scalable model and the gains compound.

BP is now producing two and a half times more content with 23% less effort. That benefit is also realized in customer reach. For example, customer engagement activity has grown threefold in the last 12 months alone. By intelligently optimizing across offer, channel, and customer moment, BP has been able to put its marketing budget in the right place at the right time, helping support measurable business results.

Over the past year, active loyalty customers grew 12% and loyalty transactions rose 7%. This is what it looks like when marketing becomes a true commercial driver. We also continue to see green shoots of enterprise-wide AI transformations where our clients have been investing in strong digital cores. PPC is one of the leading early examples.

Over the past several years, we've helped PPC Group, Greece's largest electricity utility, strengthen its digital core and build the foundations to drive continuous reinvention. Today, we're helping PPC put AI at the center of its next phase of growth as it transforms from a traditional utility into a power tech company, using AI to reinvent and expand into new businesses and markets. AI will be infused across the enterprise from power generation and customer experience to renewables and corporate functions, bringing together larger volumes of data to get work done faster.

For example, in energy management, AI will help to cut analysis time in half, helping traders make faster pricing and hedging decisions. At the same time, AI will help deliver more seamless digital experiences to millions of customers, increasing customer lifetime value and driving top-line growth. PPC Group is not inserting AI into its existing processes, it is reinventing them. As the group expands beyond its traditional utility business, it is rebuilding how work gets done around clear outcomes with people in the lead and agents on task, measuring the value of every change and reskilling its workforce.

In parallel, we're also seeing clients continue to move deeper into functions, particularly in areas such as customer experience, supply chain and finance as they redesign end-to-end processes and ways of working around AI. In customer experience, we're using conversational AI, including voice and chat agents, to handle live interactions, resolve inquiries faster and provide a more personalized experience, helping organizations drive customer satisfaction and retention.

In supply chain, we're using advanced AI to improve demand forecasting across complex distribution networks, enabling more accurate forecasts and faster, more automated decisions which can optimize costs and improve margins. And in finance, we're building AI reasoning agents that allow CFOs and finance teams to ask questions in plain English and analyze detailed profit and loss data, helping finance leaders get ahead of trends, make faster, better-informed decisions, and free their teams to focus on the work that drives business results. And increasingly we are seeing AI move into the core value chain of industries.

For a leading pharmaceutical company, we're using Faculty's Frontier platform to improve a critical part of developing a new medicine: clinical trial planning. The platform simulates different trial scenarios, helping teams decide where to run studies, which sites to use, and how to respond when patient enrollment falls behind. In an initial application, the platform reduced the time needed to create and analyze trial scenarios from 10 days to 10 minutes, improved patient enrollment forecast accuracy by 60%, and identified study designs that could shorten trial timelines by up to three months.

In an industry where each day of delay can mean up to $1 million in lost revenue, faster planning can help therapies reach patients sooner and improve the return on R&D investment. It is a strong example of how we combine our technology with deep life sciences industry expertise to turn faster, better decisions into meaningful business value. You can see in these examples the breadth of demand which we expect to continue and the breadth and depth of our expertise. Today, we've covered logistics, energy and pharma, and they span from enterprise functions like finance to growth functions like marketing to the core value chain like clinical trials to the digital core.

Turning to our full fiscal year, we had another strong year, delivering profitable growth, taking significant market share, returning record cash to shareholders and investing at scale in our business to strengthen our near and long term growth. We did so in a very dynamic macro environment which we expect to continue. 5 billion of revenue over FY25. We delivered these results while absorbing an approximately 1 percentage point impact from our federal business, which sunset at the end of Q3.

We had bookings of more than $84 billion, up 5% in US dollars and 3% in local currency. This included 141 quarterly client bookings greater than 100 million, 12 more than last year. These bookings are a proxy for the effectiveness of our reinvention strategy and position us well for future transformations as AI scales. We also ended the year with 317 diamond clients, our largest relationships.

We also delivered strong adjusted earnings per share growth and free cash flow, and we returned a record amount of cash to shareholders, 38% more than in fiscal 2025. 9 billion in strategic acquisitions, 1 billion in R&D, and 1 billion in learning and development as we continue to upskill and reskill our people for the AI era. In fiscal 2026, our people completed 46 million hours of training and we now have nearly 110,000 AI and data professionals, exceeding our three-year goal to double our AI and data workforce from 40,000 to 80,000 by the end of fiscal 2026. As we look forward, we are confident in our future.

We continue to believe the opportunities related to AI are greater than the impact of AI-related efficiencies on our business and we expect that to continue as AI enables enterprises to do much more. At the same time, AI is making both our own delivery and the technologies we implement more efficient. Consistent with prior technology waves, we see this in two areas: the additional productivity we achieve in delivering our services, which creates greater value for our clients, and faster, more efficient implementations as our ecosystem partners embed more AI capabilities into their platforms.

Our strategy is to lean into these efficiencies precisely because they create value for our clients while continuing to invest and rotate our capabilities to capture the larger growth opportunities AI creates. That is why we continue to view AI as a tailwind for Accenture. As we look at the AI opportunity, our strong ecosystem position is one of the reasons we are so confident. Our top 10 ecosystem partners represented more than 60% of our revenue in fiscal 2026 and revenue from that work grew 6%, outpacing Accenture overall.

For our eight emerging AI and data partners, bookings more than tripled and revenue more than doubled compared with fiscal 2025. The tech ecosystem is incredibly dynamic, with nearly daily change related to AI. This means our clients have more choices, but they also have more decisions to make and they turn to us to help them make these decisions, to help them bring these technologies together and turn them into business outcomes. To give you a flavor of this dynamic environment: data and AI are now core to all of our partners, both our largest partners and our emerging data and AI partners.